


Indomitable Roommates

by lmhawk



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Episode: The Adventures of the Darrington Brigade, Gen, Roommates, non-canon backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:33:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23380249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lmhawk/pseuds/lmhawk
Summary: The three female members of the Darrington Brigade share a room, contimplate this new shift in their lives, and figure out how to live with each other and the other members of the BrigadeorNobody else was writing Darrington Brigade fanfiction, and that meant that I had to write it, even if it meant coming out of years of not writing fanfiction, because apparently, if you want something to exist, you have to write it.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I took quite a few liberties with the characters' backstories, given how little I had to work with. While I do try my best to keep up with what's happening in fandom, I don't have twitter and so I apologize if I missed something someone said about their backstories. That being said, I hope at least some of you are as excited about this as I am.

Farriwen is a little bit overwhelmed, and trying to bring herself into a meditative headspace. The fight with The Owlbear, and wasn't that a bizarre name for a human, made some sense. She'd sparred enough back at the monastery to understand the principle of sparring, and it was hardly unexpected. The non-profit nature of the Brigade did throw her off, but she needs the training and maybe she can convince Tarry that the monastery needing the funds is for the good of mankind. If the money goes straight to them and not to her first it's technically not profit, and it helps anyway. She was not expecting Tarryon Darrington himself to break down into tears. That was a bit awkward and the chaos of the house is quite unexpected. At the monastery, everyone learned the indoor spaces were for quiet, and even outside, things were structured, and everyone had a place and a purpose. What little time was not spent in structured training was spent in quiet meditation or artistic pursuits. People spoke quietly, even, in most cases, in anger or tears. It was just how the monks were. That was something she'd noticed in her travel to Diastock; people were loud. Hazel Copperpot, especially, brought a whole new level to loudness. Her voice was always louder than she'd ever heard her instructor being, and she jingles when she walks. The others are not as bad, but only The Owlbear seems to be able to speak at a quiet respectable level. They share a brief conversation and and afterwards, he knows that she thinks he fought well, and she knows that he doesn't hold her knocking him unconscious against him.

The dogs, Barry, Karry, and Vax'ildan start barking as soon as the eight of them came through the door. Laurence managed to get them to quiet down, and shows the new Brigade members to their rooms. The Owlbear tries to claim that he really only needs a corner to curl up in when Macaroni and Buddy insist that he sleep with them, which leave Farrawin sharing a room with Damian and Hazel. Damian sounds pleased enough when she points it out. Out of the two of them, Farriwen is more worried about her having a problem with it. They? Damian seemed ambivalent about being called a lady, and dresses in a very masculine way, though Damian also doesn't bother to hide the curve of the breasts, very nice breasts as it were; Damian also doesn't seem like the sort of person you can just ask about preferred pronouns. Farriwen decides "she" is alright, if she was asked outright and didn't object.

Hazel is extremely excited about the prospect of sharing a room. She calls them "the indomitable roommates" and suggests that they form a secret society. Her enthusiasm, even expressed as loudly as it is, is genuine and endearing. Farriwen ventures to ask if she sleeps with the instruments on, which, in retrospect was a rather obvious question. Hazel answers by telling her about the guided sleep meditation she has, presumably like the excerpt from Tarryon Darrington's book that she had stored in wax somehow. Farriwen has done guided meditations before with the clerics and other monks at the monastery, but she can't reconcile that sort of quiet practice with this woman, who seems to exude loudness. Still perhaps she will try it. Hazel still hasn't answered her question though, which is a bit odd.

Damian must think so as well, because when they're together in the room she turns to Hazel, who has a large case of extra wax cylinders and a tool kit that's really too bulky to by hauling around and a pack with some clothing and other personal effects in it. "Hey, you never answered her question. Do you sleep with suit on? I mean that would be rather uncomfortable, right?"

"Ah, I may have misinterper-ated you quest-i-on," Hazel said, with the same weird cadence in dragging the words out for extra syllables. "I do usually remove the instruments before retiring for the evening. In fact I should probably take a por-ti-on of them off before dinner."

Farriwen thinks about asking what she'd thought the question meant, or maybe even thanking Damian for offering clarification in her stead, but decides against saying that and instead says, "Is there any preference on who takes which bed?"

"I want the bed by the window," Damian says, then quickly looks at the other two. "If that's okay with you guys."

Hazel nods. "I am quite agreeable with that." She surveys the other two beds. "I think it would be prudent for me to take the one on the left, as it seems to have more space underneath, if you have no object-ti-on."

The three beds are radically different, with the one to the left of the window does seem to be the tallest. "Oh that's quiet alright." Farriwen says. To show she means it, she sets the bag she took from the monastery on the end of the bed to the right. The bag has a few other dresses, and a blanket that she's been using as a bedroll, but not much else. She takes the blanket out and lays it over the bed, which feels like the first step towards something semi-permanent.

Damian, similarly, doesn't seem to have much more than a handful of stuff, though she does take her bag and drape it over the bedpost before hopping up to sit on the bed. She joins Farriwen in watching Hazel shove all of her things under the bed, still wearing the instruments and clanking discordantly. Damion, it seems, is more willing to ask questions because she says, "How come you need so much stuff anyway? Do you travel with all of that?"

"Not usu-ally," Hazel says. "I need to to maintain my audiomatic, but I only need a fraction of this if I have a base of opera-ti-ons."

"Huh," Damien says. She swings her feet idly. "And you built that thing yourself?"

"Well, I did have some help from my sister, but for the most part, I did indeed."

Damion snorts. "My sisters would never help me build anything. Then again, building stuff was never really our thing, you know?"

Hazel smiles slightly. "Building things was very much my sisters 'thing', as it were." She finishes stowing the bulky part of her equipment and takes a moment to pull something out of her pack. It's a piece of rough paper, not nearly the quality needed for transcribing and the like, and when she unfolds it, it turns out to be a relatively well done sketch of a dwarven woman with a neatly braided beard and a handful of children, along with a few older dwarves, one of whom is clearly Hazel, though without her band suit and holding a fiddle under her chin instead.

Farriwen doesn't comment, but something tugs at her heart. She never knew her parents, had been raised at the monastery, but she remembers the other orphan's she grew up with, remembers the games they used to play, remembers the gentle teasing and the helping each other with lessons even as they competed for the master's favor. Being on the road is lonely.

Damian, predictably, is the one to ask, "That your family?" And maybe it's Farriwen's imagination, but she sounds slightly wistful.

"Yes it is," Hazel said. "That is my mother and all of her children, the day my sister made her first infus-i-on." She carefully sets the picture aside and turns to the other two grinning, though maybe it's slightly forced. "Maybe we can can also become sisters of a sort."

Farriwen doesn't know about that, but sharing a room with other people that she's starting to get to know seems a little less lonely.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Damian ponders the household dynamics.

When Damian first showed up at the Darrington estate, she'd thought Laurence, who let them in, was just a trophy husband grown old, especially since he wasn't part of the brigade, but there's something close to love between him and Tarryon, or at the very least genuine affection. Still, she didn't think about it much once the sparring started, because hell yeah she was up for sparring, and she just got super cool new flaming swords. Whenever two or more branches of the Vadoma family meet, there's always a fight to be had, and there are enough clerics of the Moonweaver or the Stormlord kicking around that nobody's at risk of dying. The clerics usually don't fight, though, so Damian was unprepared for the ferocity that is Macaroni Samsonite. To be fair, she probably wouldn't have been prepared for Macaroni Samsonite anyway. She was worried that she might not get a place in the brigade, and she was ready to point out how banishment isn't really winning a fight, though it is pretty cool, she had to admit, and if there's one thing that being in so many family scraps has taught her, it's how to lose with panache.

Then Tarryon had started crying, and she wasn't sure what to do. Laurence would probably be the person to get. That was what you did, get somebody's Wife, because that was the kind of skill set you needed. And even if Laurence had just married Tarryon for love, he would still be the person to get, because that was who Tarryon would respond to, general skill at crying people or none. Or maybe she shouldn't. She people were just tightly wound, cried easily but could snap out of it quick enough. She ventured to ask him, which led to him trying to claim he was fine, which, yeah, was what you did, so he wasn't totally breaking down, and then Macaroni stepped in, and really, clerics were good at people, so that worked out pretty well. Then Laurence came over while Buddy was lifting Tarryon in the air and everything seemed to get back on to some semblance of a track.

Damian knows there's a difference between somebody's wife and a Wife. If somebody is just a thug or has no real importance within the family, then they can just marry somebody because they love them or they're hot, or they've already had a few kids together, or whatever. But somebody who has a little bit of sway, who has a household and a few grown kids already and is moving up in the ranks, if they get married, they marry for the family, somebody who has ties to some other group as a sign of a modicum of trust, of an understanding between the groups. Whoever takes the mantle almost always has to be of the opposite gender, or at the very least the opposite sex, because children help bind the bloodlines. And whoever gets offered up to marry someone like that gets shafted, and probably barely has a choice and she, or in rare cases he, gives up everything she had before, stops whatever racket she had and gives it over to her siblings or someone else in the family and then has to not only give up her old family for a new one, and give up whatever life she had just because her family needed her to, but also had to be on the top of her fucking game at domestic shit, and keeping the household together, and raising not only her own kids, but any extra bastard kids thrown in, and present herself as fucking something in someone else's family without resorting to violence or outright threats, which took balls composure, on top of being stuck with somebody you didn't actually love. It got ten times harder if she got widowed, because then you were stuck with a family that wasn't yours, bound by nothing but a technically broken promise, trying to be the most composed out of all of them with nobody to back you up.

Tarryon and Laurence definitely married for love, it's obvious; They have dogs together. The house is an extension of Tarryon's bizarre desire to help people, with all sorts of people crashing there who have no other place to go. Still there are rooms for the newly minted brigade members, and even if she has to share, Damian doesn't mind. Hazel was enthusiastic enough for all three of them when she pointed it out, and Farrawin, for all she's quiet, seemed to be on board. Plus, she can kick ass and take names, and still have enough presence of mind to ask for healing for the opponent she knocked out, which Damian can respect. The three of them spent a little while hanging around the new room before they headed down for dinner.

It's at dinner that Damion meets Maria Darrington, and everything about her just screams "Wife", and of course, Damian is nice to her, because it's an important mark of civility, to be nice to people's mothers, at least when you aren't meeting under unrelated circumstances to screw them over, and she's trying to not do that anymore. The old woman's nice about it too, even when Damian is a wreck and totally uncouth. She's sitting on one side of Mrs. Darrington while Tarryon is sitting on the other, with Laurence on his other side and Lionel next to him The Owlbear next to him, and the other five new brigade members across on the other side of the table, Buddy and Macaroni next to Damian, with Hazel next to them and Farrawin on the other side.

Buddy's already eating and Tarryon asks if anyone wants to say a prayer of some sort. Usually, Damian's father insisted on a prayer to the Moonweaver because her grandfather, even if he had left Uthodurn to found a criminal empire hundreds of years ago, he still held a soft spot for the goddess of his youth. Unfortunately, the only cleric among them is too busy casting his healing spell to hear. Damian thinks that maybe Farrawin is trying to say something, but she's too quiet for her own good and hasn't earned the reputation of being harass enough that she can get away with it, especially when she's next to Hazel. Then Hazel offers up a concerto, and The Owlbear says that justice is his religion. Apparently that and Macaroni finishing his spell-prayer is enough religion for the table, because that's when Tarryon gives up on it and starts eating. Damian's actually curious about the song Hazel would have played, but she's also hungry, and there's food on the table, and the wash of extra healing gives her a nice little buzz.

They toast the shooting star, which Damian thinks is sort of silly, but it's Mrs. Darrington's idea and Damian doesn't want to deny her that. The others all seem on board with it, apart from The Owlbear, who Damian can see, because he's in the other side of the table. He seems to be going along with it as well, probably for the same reason. He was the only other new brigade member to remember to thank Mrs. Darrington. Tarryon uses the moment to kiss his husband and yeah, those two married for love. Farrawin says that the shooting star's a sign, but Damian doesn't know what the hell it's supposed to be a sign of. Hazel suggests making a wish, but Damian hasn't believed in that since she was nine and she wished her older brother would do well on his first job. Her brother ended up getting shot with a crossbow bolt and arrested. Fortunately, they couldn't prove anything, and he was out three days later, but it was still enough to convince Damian that wishing on stars was fucking pointless.

Then there's a rumbling and Buddy says, "Excuse me," which Damian is slightly impressed by, because that's the politest fucking ogre she ever knew. Then he clears his throat and says "Chipiwa," which Damian doesn't get. Then Tarryon offers Buddy a little good-natured ribbing, and Macaroni calls the fart a preview and Damian does get that, after a minute,and she's so caught up in getting in on a joke with new people who she was getting along with so well that she speaks out loud and that makes Macaroni laugh and it feels good. Then The Owlbear says "Oh boy," and he sounds disappointed, and Damion gets why, a bit, because fart jokes are for kids. What are they, twelve?

She turns to Mrs. Darrington and says, "Sorry Mrs. Darrington." She can't bring herself to regret sharing a joke with her new teammates, but she does feel a little bit bad making Mrs. Darrington sit through their juvenile humor when she's been so nice about letting them into her home. Mrs. Darrington is totally fine with it, turns out. She brushes off Damian's concern and Damian appreciates that. She's starting to feel warm in a way that has nothing to do with the mild temperature outside or the glass of meh wine she's had.

Laurence, she can tell, is annoyed, although his annoyance softens when Tarryon slings his arm around him and bumps their heads together. And Damian doesn't care, because Mrs. Darrington doesn't care. She's clearly the more prominent Wife. And not because he's technically a husband, because she can see shades of Wife in the way he keeps things domestically, but because Mrs. Darrington holds herself with practice ease of hosting them and being the head of household without declaring herself the head of household.

Damian usually wouldn't have bothered sussing out the power dynamic between them, because anytime she was in a new household, it was always either to try and negotiate, which meant constantly figuring how a fight might happen if things were to go south and how well the house was secured for if it went south softly and they needed to break in later, or to plan a job, which, even if she and her crew mostly trusted the other party, meant focusing on the job at hand. She always thanked the spouse who was hosting, of course, but either they were in on it, in which case their capabilities were the only thing that mattered, or they were not, in which case they were extraneous. It's a rare thing for Damian, to be able to sit and have dinner at somebody's house and not have immediate business be in the way of simple observations about the household and genuinely laughing at dumb jokes, and Damian finds that she likes it. It reminds her of hanging out with her cousins, and maybe she can get used to this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter came about because I noticed how much respect Damian has for Mrs. Darrington and her domestic role, and then tried to think through the ramifications of this in a world where women are not excluded from roles that they have, traditionally, been excluded from in our world and men are more commonly found in domestic roles. Also I may or may not have written a full history of the Vadoma family starting with the fall of Molaesmyr.


End file.
